With Bob Stein, Lonna Atkeson, Trey Hood, and Mason Reece

  Central to the operation of democratic governance is the electorate’s confidence that the outcome of elections are legitimate. Losing candidates and their supporters must believe in the integrity of a lost election for democracies to be sustainable. There is increasing evidence that voters’ confidence in the outcome of elections, and more specifically, that their vote was counted accurately, is dominated by whether the voter supported the winning or losing candidate in an election. We ask whether this winner (loser) effect is consistent over time and parties? Additionally, we test whether the strength of this effect on voter confidence varies across electoral level (i.e., confidence in a county, state, and nations vote counting). We identify the voter’s experience casting their ballot and the electoral competitiveness of their state as potential correctives for the diminished confidence among supporters of the losing candidate(s). We find that both living in a competitive state and having a positive voting experience shape a losing voter's confidence in the accuracy of vote counting.

THE RACIAL CONTEXT OF VOTING AND VOTER CONFIDENCE

There is increasing evidence that voters’ confidence in the outcome of elections, and more specifically, that their vote was counted accurately, is dominated by whether the voter supported the winning or losing candidate in an election. Losing candidates and their supporters must beli eve in the integrity of a lost election for democracies to be sustainable. In this paper, we ask whether the social context in which a voter casts their ballot can be a partial corrective for lack of confidence in the outcome of elections among supporters of losing candidates. Robust literatures on voter confidence and intergroup context and contact lead us to claim that the context in which a person votes shapes their belief that other peoples’ votes are counted correctly. Specifically, we propose that interacting with a member of an out-group while voting should increase a voter’s confidence that out-group members votes are being counted accurately. Observing that an out-group member’s ballot is handled identically to one’s own ballot should increase confidence that all votes are counted accurately. We leverage data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections from 2008-2020 as well as the Integrity of Mail Voting in the 2020 Election dataset to test whether interacting with an out-group member while voting influences a voter’s confidence in the accuracy of vote counting across various electoral levels.